From DOORSv.9 to NextGen? Don’t Double Down for Twice the Trouble

Marc Oppy | May 12, 2015

If you’re considering a move from DOORSv.9 to NextGen because you think you have no choice, hold that thought; you do. See for yourself how much more efficient, faster and easier product development and management could be with a free 30-day Jama trial.

Are you building for the long run or just to get by right now? For any company making requirements management software and tools that product managers need to use, that is the question. And for DOORS users, just getting people to use the tool is a constant and frustrating challenge.

At Jama, we do our work in the very same product delivery platform that we sell to our customers. Using Jama to develop, manage and help it evolve it as a product gives us unique insight into its current capabilities and future potential, and it’s also why you’ll never find a bloated list of features you can’t use—or have to beg anyone else to use, either.

We balance the improvements we make to Jama according to a simple outline:

Basics (things that customers can be confident we provide and will continue to evolve)

Linear features (the more the better, such as performance)

Delighters (innovations that customers didn’t realize they wanted)

Since we launched Jama’s Support Community, we’ve been able to receive and respond to questions and suggestions for features, gauge demand from our customers and understand what works and what doesn’t in certain instances. Our thoughtful community members have helped us prioritize our work and select which new features to pursue.

But the art of product management is really about living within a constant flow of ideas and demand, and then allowing only a controlled, select number of them into development. Let too many ideas through and you’re forced to cut corners. Or it just takes a very long time to finish anything.

That’s why we’ve always invested a large chunk of our time and expertise in differentiation. I asked Alex Pukinskis, Jama’s Director of Product Management, to explain why this is, and he summed it up nicely:

“When you choose to invest in differentiation, your goal is to create something that is meaningfully different from your competitors, and hard to copy. It takes time, and it should, because if you try to differentiate too quickly and too cheaply, competitors can easily catch up and you just have to do it again. This is particularly troubling for companies that emphasize differentiation only in added features and not in fundamental functionality. It’s why Jama invests in building a great user experience from the ground up; it’s very difficult to copy, much less to insert or integrate consistent and rock-solid UX if it’s not a foundational principal of the product’s original design. This, in our view, is also why IBM is giving up on legacy DOORS. It’s simply too much work and expense to improve the UX of a product that wasn’t built to prioritize the user experience from day one.”

Building new products shouldn’t be frustrating and wasteful. It ought to be enlightening and profitable. If you’re a current DOORS user, we invite you to compare and contrast the way you currently work with Jama. Sign up for a free 30-day trial and give us a shot. No installation required.